


Her Eyes

by Incadove, Lillithan



Category: In the Bleak Midwinter (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, OR IS IT, non Canon, really fully, seriously just fluff, soft and warm, welcome to my crack ship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:14:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29444661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Incadove/pseuds/Incadove, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lillithan/pseuds/Lillithan
Summary: There had been something in her eyes that left him enraptured.  Drawing him in with an awareness he couldn't fathom.
Relationships: Galina/Luka
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	Her Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to my crack ship lulina. In this world Galina is our precious boys soulmate. Pull up a pillow and enjoy the fluffy moment brought to you by my sister and I.

There had been something in her eyes that left him enraptured. Drawing him in with an awareness he couldn't fathom. And as trite as it sounded, he couldn’t get out of his mind the way her gaze had landed on him. Time had quite literally stood still in that moment, his wrist alighting with a deep thrumming that had taken him by complete surprise. However, her gaze had remained steady, almost contemplative. She had remained unwavering across the room from him while internally he turned into a total mess of nerves. Which, he reasoned, was why he was leaning against the door frame that entered into the tech room. Typically Ivan's domain, but the newest addition to their forces had also made herself home in the small cubical of a room as well. 

The room was… well, it was a wreck. Wires hung from the shelves on the wall at random, as if thrown there in a frenzy. Among the haphazardly strewn wires were boxes with contents Luka could only guess at. These as well were not placed neatly on the shelves, but instead turned every which way. However, the most organization he saw came from the rows of lined up old metal cans. Everything from nuts, bolts, nails, screws and various pilfered bits of tools rested in these cans. Once he had offered to help Ivan organize this room only to be shut down instantly. Apparently the man thought the mess was an organized mess, and if Luka put anything away, then it would be lost to Ivan forevermore. 

The air smelled distinctly of oil, petrol and dust, and luka thought, perhaps that was quite a fitting smell for Galina. She was all gears and guts, thinking and acting, while he preferred a more reserved approach, preferring to think and analyzing before charging full speed ahead. 

His hands tightening on the pen and paper he held in his hand, feeling almost guilty at the need to capture her likeness on paper, course through his every muscle. She was beauty and sass, a frozen fire that sears his thoughts and he _needs_ to put her on paper. 

Flipping the pencil in hand a few rotations, Luka frowns briefly at the blank paper before starting with a quick sketch. Swiftly, he becomes absorbed in the lines flowing across the page. Glancing up from time to time, secretly thankful that whatever she was currently working on didn’t move her form much. Art has always been an escape for him, a way to forget about the war going on endlessly in the background. Giving him a moment to ground his mind, focus and learn to cope through the chaos that he saw on a daily basis. In this, he focuses on the lines of her lean form. Curving and bowing as she tinkers with whatever project she is working on. He continues to draw, looking on from time to time, always a second too late to catch her own frowned glances in his direction. After a time, his pencil stills and he stretches the kinks from his lower back. Smiling to himself, he gazes down at what he has managed to capture. She was certainly an enigma. Strong but feminine. Stern but with a cupid's bow lip and the adorable way the tip of her tongue sticks out as she tinkers.

He finds himself inexplicably drawn back to the tech room the following day, but unlike the prior day, perches himself on an empty bench to sit and watch. 

At least he tried to watch. But the nervous twitching of his fingers forces him to pull his sketchbook from his backpack and begin, once more etching in the soft lines of her form. Today, however, she spends a good majority of the time cussing out the tools around her. And Luka’s imagination got the better of him. The softly voiced (and sometimes not so softly _yelled_ ) curses tilts his world on its axis. Calm, cool and artistically collected he could not be with the way her voice growls. He left earlier that day, a disheveled mess of a man.

By the third day of feeling his eyes on her, Galina is more than fed up. His quiet lurking that had started with him standing by the door that had now escalated to him sitting quietly on a chair in the corner. Always with the silly notebook in his hand glancing up at her moments before she would turn to look back at him. It was annoying and frustrating and damn it, she was tired of being watched. She hates being watched. It was worse than being in battle, because watchers were easy targets. She wasn’t a target. She refused to be a target. It wasn’t as if her life wasn’t crazy enough. With the constant threat of death hovering over everyone’s head, now she has to deal with this. Whatever this really was. 

And he was just staring and scribbling. What was she supposed to do with that knowledge?

Wringing the cloth against her filthy hands, Galina swiftly decides enough is enough. Tossing it on the scrap metal piece of crap that Ivan thinks is ‘going to win the war’, she turns and glowers at the male sitting quietly in the corner.

“Yo!” The exclamation jolts him so hard he nearly falls off his seat before catching himself. All the while a small smirk wiggles to freedom on her serious expression. 

“Ye...es!” Jumping to his feet, the single word stammering free from his nervous lips. He reminds Galina of an excitable puppy.

Gliding through the rejected bits of metal scattered around her, she makes her way toward him. “Just what exactly are you doing?”

It would be the slow, confused blink that captures her own attention. The way that his expression is so lost before the blush hits his cheeks. 

"W-well, I-I'm --” His eyebrows furrow as he seemingly refuses to make eye contact with his soulmate. 

“Uh huh,” Her unconvinced sound is amplified by the raising of an eyebrow and her hands resting on her hips. 

“-- Um, Drawing?” His attention is suffering between watching her stand poised before him, and wondering if that’s a caliper holding the flimsy ceiling beams together. Instinctively, he wants to move her just in case Ivan’s rickety patch work chooses that moment to fail.

“Clearly. But why here.” Her clipped remark is more a statement than a question as Luka continues to mentally struggle. 

His eyes are squinting now, not in the vain attempt of hiding what he was doing. But because he is so distracted by the … C-clamp holding the beams together. Worry hits him in the gut. What if it failed and the whole ceiling fell on top of her while she was working? What if Ivan got a little too excited about their latest build and jumps and knocks some strange thing over and it starts a chain reaction… “Because..” The single word is all he is able to eke out as his mind fills with one destasterious event after another. 

“How ‘enlightening’.” Pinching her nose, Galina attempts a different approach and simply reaches over and grabs the sketch pad from his loose grasp. 

The action seems to startle him back into the present, his hands automatically reaching out and attempting to snag it back from her. 

The attempt fails, as he knew it would. Instead of trying harder, he simply lets his hands fall back to his sides and waits. Truthfully, he’s curious to see her reaction. 

Galina was ill prepared for what she saw. While, yes, she had expected ‘drawings’ of some sort, it was well known that Luka liked to dabble with art. It is the multitudes of small little sketches that flow sometimes quickly, but oftentimes with more conscious purpose across the yellowing pages that struck her. Various faces, many of which she does not recognize, look back at her from the pages. She can see immediately that he is drawn to capturing ‘humanity’ in all its strange and motley forms. 

Watching her face relax from the perpetual scowl she often wears, warms his heart. Luka gently takes the book from her and flips it to the last few pages before handing it back. His graceful fingers gently smoothing over the last image he had been working on. Her heart stutters at the tender smile on his handsome face before glancing down and gasping softly.

Unable to stop the naturally soft smile that touches her lips, Galina continues to gaze at the drawing in her hand. Her dirty fingers itching to smooth over the image of herself but terrified of dirting the delicate sketch. The image is still very rough, and she realizes that she caught him as he was attempting to smooth the lines of her figure out. Still, she murmurs softly, "you made me look so beautiful."

Cheeks reddening, nervously his voice lowers, "Because you are." 

Intimacy is something that Galina has shied away from for most of her life. Sex is one thing. But the intimate knowledge of what ‘emotions’ bring to the plate is not something she ever thought she would crave. She could die tomorrow, what purpose would emotions make beyond that additional level of grief? However, standing with Luka right now, gazing over the attention to detail that he employed to create her image. She is lost. Pink dusts her cheeks in the response to his breathly murmured comment. And it's all she can do to redirect the mood. She’s not ready for this, not yet. 

A sly smile crosses her lips as her eyes glance up to stare into his own. And with a soft chuckle she points out, "It looks really good, but my ass is definitely not that big."

Blush flushing back to life, Luka starts stuttering an embarrassed apology. His mind skittering through possible phrases to tell her she did in fact have a nice ass…. But _without_ actually saying she “has a nice ass." 

Laughing against her better judgement, Galina leans toward him with mischief dancing in her eyes. “I’m kidding.”

Her gaze drawn back to the sketchbook in one hand she makes a spontaneous decision. Her warm fingers gently reach out and take his hand. Leading them both to the spot he had just sat moments ago. Settling on the hard bench, she pats the spot next to her to encourage Luka to sit. 

“Okay big boy, tell me about the rest of these.”

The smile he hits her with is radiant, and Galina can feel a small flutter of ‘something’ in her belly. It's probably gas, she tells herself as she wiggles slightly just to be safe. His sketchbook is set on her lap and for the first time in a very long while, Luka gently begins to tell her the stories. With each turn of the page brings the people he once knew back to life.

~FIN~

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> While not required, reviews and kudos feed us! I hope you enjoyed!


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